Tract
The Left-Hand Path and the American Security State
A cultural and intellectual history of where the postwar American security state and the Western left-hand path crossed paths — and what the documentary record actually supports, against the much louder version repeated in conspiracy literature.
The CIA and the US Army funded parapsychology and consciousness research from the late 1940s through the early 1990s. That programmatic side — Project Stargate and its predecessors, the MKULTRA ESP subprojects, the SRI remote-viewing contracts, the brief INSCOM episode under Major General Albert Stubblebine — is documented in detail in a companion piece on plausibledenial.org/dossiers/mindwar. This tract concerns the parallel cultural-historical side: the small number of individuals whose biographies place them simultaneously inside the American security apparatus and inside the postwar reorganisation of Western esoteric currents, the historical conditions that made that overlap possible, and what the documentary record does and does not support about it.
The argument here is not that the CIA studied Satanism. It did not. It studied parapsychology and consciousness research, principally as a defensive response to Soviet work in the same fields. The overlap with left-hand-path traditions is biographical, not programmatic, and it concentrates in one principal case — that of Michael Aquino, career US Army psychological operations officer and founder of the Temple of Set. The interest of his case is exactly that it stands almost alone. For the editorial standard governing what is and isn’t cited here, see the site’s methodology.